Caption about the
iymage goes in
hereon our art pipeline – all that comes
together to create a plan. Fog is not
there for performance, but [...] it fits
together and we leverage that as
much as we can.” Some players miss
the point here, Vikström adds,
assuming that the fog exists simply to
lessen the load on the game’s engine.
“The fog in GTFO is so much more
than just a vision limiter, it’s a mood
setter, right? So sometimes I get the
question, can you disable the fog?
And I’m like, ‘No, you’re basically
disabling half the game.’”
For a small team like 10
Chambers, testing for things that
threaten the target specifications can
be practically a horror game itself. “A
simple chair could be low res in
polygons, but then accidentally have
a super high res shadow mesh, or
something like that. It’s a simple
problem to fix, but first, somebody
needs to find that. So you need to
have an analytic toolset to evaluate
the complexity of the meshes. Do
some kind of filtering to see if, oh,
there’s a shadow mesh here with tens
of thousands of polygons or triangles- that doesn’t make sense. Or maybe
the test is automated, and then
maybe somebody needs to add
safeguards, but it could also be that
our render programmer needs to
optimise the order in which things
are rendered, or an assistant
programmer needs to make sure
that chairs are never rendered if
they’re behind a door.”
It might sound more sensible to
focus on honing an optimum look
and framerate, then dialling things
back for less powerful systems down
the road, but this can be catastrophic,
Vikström says. “It’s really hard to go
down in quality after years of
production. You need to plan for low
spec straight away, and constantly
work towards it. Because after a
couple of years, if you don’t do that, it
just becomes too big of a hurdle. And
then your low spec slowly creeps up
until it’s meeting your high spec.”SET TING EXPECTATIONS
While he feels that developers today
disregard lower spec machines,
Goddard also suggests that today’s
players have more ways of
customising their PC games today.
“You have settings for everything, like
turning the rain on and off. I think it’s
become more a question of personal
preference, rather than whether your
PC can handle it, and I think people
expect to have the control. Because
maybe they have really specced-out
their PC and they know exactly whatSKY HIGH
Alexander Murphy on bringing MoH: Above
and Beyond to the Oculus Quest platform“Framerate is king in
VR, so that took
priority with
graphics resolution
close behind. We
also added some
features, such as the
ability to toggle the
multisampling
anti-aliasing level.
Since this is a VR
project, we had to
set up an entirely
new build and
testing pipeline.”“There is a
misconception that
[porting] is ‘easy’
since you have the
base game to work
from. In reality,
optimisation is a
difficult challenge
that requires a
robust set of tools,
strict technical
guidelines and
talented artists who
know how to make
the game shine.”“Respawn had done
such a fantastic job
giving players an
immersive
experience by
playing a wide range
of audio tracks
simultaneously. To
get the performance
level we wanted
while staying within
budget, we removed
some subtler tracks
after optimising
the sound.”it can do. Whereas in the old days, it
was basically choosing low, medium
or high, and the game would decide
what to turn off and on.”
This certainly encapsulates
Lab42’s approach to porting Yakuza.
“A lot of the time, designing settings
isn’t a matter of making those things
exist, but exposing them,” Goodwin
comments. “[For Yakuza] we looked
at what was in the engine, and just
made a slider and graphics option for
literally everything that was going
on.” The studio repurposed the
game’s level-of-detail system, forABOVE: (^) Lab42
repurposed existing
features of the game’s
engine into graphics
options for low-spec
machines.
FEATURE
Low-Spec Gaming
MAXIMUM Yakuza 0
Tasomachi